


Stitches

by kriegy (oldbosie)



Category: Borderlands, borderlands 2 - Fandom
Genre: Aftermath, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-07
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-12-25 21:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/957720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/kriegy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short piece about Dr. Zed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitches

Zed’s ECHOs never got to Roland. They stayed grasped in muddy fittings in the slagged dregs of where he used to be, then left, then was again—then, pulled with silent wrenching on the last reaches of brittle roots, left. Again.

Zed put stitches in Roland’s throat. Just two—it was only a nick, no arteries, not deep—and one in the ear. Just where the visor cut, between the helix and the head, because that temple saw a lot of daily wear, and Zed figured Roland would have a use for that ear one day.

When Zed puts stitches in you, you can’t take them out. Not on your own. And hell, those Anshin shots are stand-ins for your deteriorating body’s capability to respond hormonally to trauma. Try to undo that, see where it gets you.

So Zed had three stitches in Roland, and he’d have more, later. But Roland got trusted. Roland got Zed’s one-faith-two-hope-three-expectations. That’s a lot, coming from a grizzled ex-MD who’s been grown like a sun blister on a planet that never seems to see a lick of shade.

Pandora was always broken, in a way—wild-faced slingers and short-straw pioneers nestled in its fissures, found solace in the way Pandora’s seamy creases broke the sweet wild winds and the cold foul ones alike. It was a pretty and treacherous place and broken and beloved and webbed over with hairline cracks. But when Jack’s drills smashed down on Pandora and the faintly concerned, moderately irradiated ants crawling over her belly, she broke—and the people broke in their warm if uncomfortable nests along her flesh.

Zed is a fixture of Pandora’s good people. He’s part of the ship, part of the crew—he’s integrated into the planet’s very landscape. He’s a symbiotic mite, or a phagocyte rolling watchfully beneath her skin, or a platelet squeezing through the pinprick wounds that threaten her life if left unclosed.

The point of all this is, when Pandora got busted, Zed got busted too. He found himself another place—the last place anyone had—and he settled in and scurried about and tried to do what he had done. He didn’t mind being a drifter.

But he had sat on a fault line, and when Pandora’s tectonic activity was rattled into near armageddon by the man with the dream-of-civil face on a scar-of-vice-and-ruin head, Zed got tremors like the rest of them. Roland was something he thought he had to grip. There’ll always be people to put stitches in. People in whom to sew purchase.

Tie off and tie things to other things.

Zed cared like hell about Roland—shit, Zed cared like hell about everyone he’d ever sat on that once-white cot of his. But he thought his stitches were true. He thought he’d pumped his sharp young man full up of bright vitality and shimmering, shimmering hope. He had the vanity to think that when he put stitches in that kid, that kid wouldn’t break—that kid wouldn’t let break anything, not ever again.

So when the kid lets New Haven break, Zed can’t believe it. He doesn’t. He doesn’t do things he can’t. He never has.

Except, of course, practice medicine.

Zed’s ECHOs never got to Roland. When New Haven got sacked, Zed was in the ugly, smiling badlands—he was busy being welcomed home, busy thinking it was over and knowing it was not. He hadn’t spoken to Roland in nearly three years. He trusted him, trusted those stitches in his throat to hold, trusted him to hear with two good ears and not let anything break.

When New Haven fell, part of Zed blamed Roland for not holding up.

But when the kid went down, quietly, all of Zed blamed those stitches for giving out.

He deserved better, Zed would say.

Zer0 would be sitting on the desk by the door, presumptive knees tucked up beneath presumptive chin, projecting redly a colon and a forward slash. Maya and Axton would widen eyes accusatorily at one another until Salvador cracked the silence—and two of Zed’s three remaining floating ribs—with a teary hug and the hearty declaration that there was no better, not on Pandora nor whatever moons or satellites floated in her skies.

This would not help.


End file.
